Economics

Growth and Development builds on concepts and theories presented in some first and second year courses, such as Multidisciplinary Economics and Intermediate Macroeconomics. The course takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the relationship between growth, poverty, and development. The course starts by reviewing theories of modern economic growth including the Solow and Lewis models. We complement and build on the Intermediate Macroeconomics course, which covers short-run business cycles, by examining long run processes of economic growth and explaining persistent differences in income levels around the world. The primary focus is on developing countries.  Second, the course reviews the measurement of poverty and inequality and their relationship with economic growth. Third, the course discusses the role of trade and institutions in shaping development trajectories. Fourth, problems of human development facing developing countries today, including issues related to demographic transitions, health, and education are analyzed. Fifth, green growth and the necessity of environmental sustainability are analyzed. And lastly, the course concludes with a discussion of the aid effectiveness debate.

The Economics of Information is a critical field that explores how information affects economic decisions, market outcomes, and organizational structures. In this course, students investigate concepts such as information asymmetry, signaling, screening, moral hazard, and adverse selection in order to understand how information and communication may lead to unfavorable outcomes in interactions between agents. Students explore the impact of these phenomena on markets, contracts, auctions, and policy-making, and show how to design institutions that could help to alleviate issues related to asymmetric information.

This is an upper division and graduate level course on experimental economics, focusing on behavioral game theory. The course covers an introduction to Experimental Economics, analyzing classic experiments in each field of behavioral game theory and describing how their results affirm or differ from economic theory and field data. The course provides opportunities to evaluate current research and practice experimental design by writing a research proposal. 

Course Prerequisite: Intermediate microeconomics or game theory. Graduate microeconomic theory and/or undergraduate analysis is valuable.
 

This course provides a study of the fundamentals of statistical inference such as probability distribution, point estimation, interval estimation, and hypothesis testing. Other topics include: sampling distributions; parameter estimation; confidence intervals; parametric hypothesis testing; ANOVA and nonparametric contrasts; Bayesian inference.

This course examines challenges posed by poverty affecting a billion people in low-income countries across the world as targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals and taking an economic approach to conceptualizing those challenges, their causes, and solutions. The course provides theoretical frameworks to understand, measure, analyze, and discuss themes within the development economics literature focusing on poverty, its consequences, and its alleviation. Key questions discussed during the course include: What is the state of progress towards relevant SDGs? What is life like when living with under a dollar a day? Are famines unavoidable? Is child labor necessary? Is education and health key to lifting people out of poverty? Does growth help the poorest of the poor? And, does aid matter for development? What is the relationship between environment and development, and how does climate change affect them? What role do sustainable food systems play in addressing both climate change and food insecurity? The course includes the following thematic topics: poverty and inequality; economic growth and development; health and education; agricultural transformation; aid; poverty, conflicts, and corruption; environment and development; sustainable food systems. 

This course examines city and regional economics in relation to the practice of city planning. It covers a range of key economic concepts and models that shape urban land uses, and urban housing and labor market systems. It encompasses the following main areas: micro/macroeconomic processes that drive urban land use, governance and planning systems; market failures as the source of urban planning problems; development feasibility; and the economic theories of urbanization, gentrification and technological transformation.

This course examines behavioral economics, which incorporates insights from psychology and neuroscience into economic analysis. It covers decision-making under uncertainty, decision-making over time, social preferences, and non-standard beliefs. It will relate theories to empirical evidence and applications, including procrastination, labor supply, finance, and policymaking. 

This course explores topics in international accounting such as: the regulatory framework; accounting policies, estimates, and errors; fair value measurement; borrowing costs; government grants; intangible assets; financial reporting in hyperinflationary economies; foreign exchange rates; earnings per share. Pre-requisites: Introduction to Accounting; Financial Accounting.

This course aims to help students understand the significance, theories, and research methods of pharmaceutical economics and its applications in pharmaceutical policies. It also introduces pharmaceutical market promotion strategies and key approaches. The course fosters logical reasoning, critical thinking, and analytical skills.

This is an advanced course in corporate finance, with the goal of bringing students to the frontier of knowledge so that they can start doing their own research in this field. 

This course focuses on nine topics in applied corporate finance:

(1)Topics related to accounting irregularities and misreporting;

(2)Topics related to the CEO's early life experience and CEO management styles;

(3)Topics related to the Fetal origins hypothesis; 

(4)Topics related to the issues of climate change risk and opportunities exposures, pollution on investor behavioral bias, and on corporate policies, and Greenwashing versus brownwashing;

(5)Topics related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies;

(6)Topics related to token-based platform finance and B2B financing;

(7)Topics related to innovation & entrepreneurship;

(8) Topics related to intergenerational persistence of occupational choice, and 

(9) Trending topics, including water quality.